Should banks trust their traders to do the right thing in compromising situations? In theory, yes. But having learnt the hard way that traders – particularly in rates and FX, don’t always resist the temptation to make money by being bad, banks like Barclays are taking their traders seriously in hand.

Bloomberg reports that traders who were previously granted the freedom to see all sorts of information about clients’ trades and clients’ deals and were trusted not to act on the basis of that information, are having their special privileges removed. For example, at Barclays and RBS, traders were once able to see all their colleagues’ forthcoming deals and all their banks’ coming buy and sell orders in aggregate. Now, however, Barclays traders can only see ‘basic information’ regarding all deals above $20m, and RBS FX traders only get to see details of trades at the benchmark rate if they’re actually involved in them.

Barclays traders can always push their luck and try to access a deeper level of information on trading flows, but if they do Bloomberg says they will trigger the intervention of an automated playground monitor stating that, ‘their interest will be logged and an email sent to compliance.’